Essays by Hugo Grinebiter

Archive for the ‘We Are All Paedophiles Now?’ Category

Camille Paglia once asked why sexual harassment codes did not explicitly incorporate penalties for false accusation. She thought that “even teenaged girls” ought to be held accountable for “the personae” they chose, since for most of their lives these personae had brought them “the rewards of attention and popularity”. This analysis may not cover all […]

In 1998 a writer on The Economist made the thought-provoking suggestion that there are two possible views of our fellows and the crimes they are likely to commit against us, one based on statistics and the other rooted in what he or she called “the moral imagination”. It is a striking phrase, and suggests that, […]

Were the stories of sexual molestation told to Freud by his patients true, or expressions of infantile fantasy? We frequently read that “in the light of what we now know”, it is more likely that they were true. But this is a circularity, since “what we now know” is dependent on our having forgotten or […]

A reviewer for Slate magazine wants the film industry to outlaw “movies or shows where the hero is a decade or more older than his love interest”. Well, it is certainly true that we do not see nearly enough romance between two mature people on the screen, and that even well-preserved actresses of 50 or […]

The comedy film Drop Dead Gorgeous, a satire on rural beauty pageants, is suspicious of the motives of pageant judges. Can it be that middle-aged men enjoy proximity to the 17-year-old women publicly certified to be the most attractive in the area? You bet. The film, however, calls them paedophiles, without asking the question: if […]

It is a puzzlement: the politically correct left is always denouncing what it calls “essentialism”, which appears to mean the notion that things are what they are in themselves, as opposed to what our self-appointed moral guardians, employing the arcane invocations of social-constructionist theory, say they must be. And yet time and again we see […]

A girl-child does not have a woman’s body, and so we may not suffer from any sexual desire for her in the sense of wanting to penetrate her and so forth; but there is little qualitative difference between the face, hair and expressive repertoire of a girl-child and the face, hair and expressive repertoire of […]

A funny thing happened to me one day in Austria. Having hiked up to a hütte that turned out not to be open for overnighting, and being too tired to reach the next one, I was driven by friendly locals to what they called a “youth hostel” down in the valley. This turned out to […]

It is a modern progressive cliché that prostitutes were all sexually abused at a tender age by their fathers, uncles, or some other adult. This may well be true of many prostitutes working at the lower end of the market and displaying self-destructive behaviour, but speaks neither to the women who are entirely together in […]

Almost all cultures and civilisations have classified sub-adults under two heads, namely “child” and “adolescent” or their linguistic equivalents. In ordinary speech ours is, of course, one of these; but Western jurisprudence appears to be increasingly turning its back on the universal wisdom that a seventeen-year-old is not the same thing as a seven-year-old. For […]